Little did I know that GSO (Graduate School of Oceanography) would become my professional home when I first arrived in summer 1975. Shaped by my family background, my frame of mind was somewhat that of a nomad, born in the US, grown up and educated in Sweden and then back to the US, first graduate school at MIT, and then a junior teaching position at Yale. Without giving it much thought I assumed I would be moving on after perhaps some half-dozen years. And now it is 48 years since I arrived, what happened?
It got busy mighty fast. The float program that Doug Webb and I had developed in MODE had been a huge success (but see the blog ‘Close call in MODE’) and now preparations were underway for a new program called polyMODE, this one in collaboration with Soviet scientists. To prepare for it I received funding for programmers, postdocs and an engineer during my first year. On top of that GSO assigned three excellent students to me that first fall. And I had virtually no experience at advising! The students and I had to sort this out together. But that became, without realizing it, the beauty of it all, a partnership in research. GSO was less a school and more a framework for conducting ocean research. Of course we faculty taught the basics of ocean science, but these were seen more as preparatory for helping the new students to get started in research rather than as end products. The purpose of a graduate school is quite different from that of a college, it is to prepare for a professional career, to develop the know-how and skills to work independently. By the time a student leaves GSO, whether with an MS or a PhD, he or she will have mastered the fundamentals and be ready to continue hopefully somewhere in an ocean-related activity.
Ocean science has evolved enormously over the last half-century. In the 1960s we couldn’t measure currents. We could launch ICBMs from submerged nuclear-powered submarines, but the only way we could know what the ocean was doing was by lowering thermometers and Nansen bottles, can you believe that!? Oceanography is an observation-based science that is defined and limited by the sensors and instruments we can work with. It wasn’t until the 1970s that we started to be able to measure currents on a systematic basis. Yet even today our knowledge of the ocean machinery is limited. This means that we have plenty to do, let’s not lose sight of GSO as a sea-going institution. Sea-going science may seem ‘romantic’ to many, and while it is exciting, it is also very hard work with plenty of uncertainties involved. (See my blog ‘Close call in the Seychelles’.) I say this because my colleagues are increasingly being burdened to provide undergraduate service. In the past when we hired faculty to GSO, we hired them more as mentors, as partners and leaders in science, than for the classroom. While some contact with the college is important, both for students and teachers, GSO’s strength lies in encouraging the faculty to be daring, to think outside the box, to imagine new science initiatives, and of course the time to develop them. This is the milieu I worked in during my active years, I see no reason to change it. My students and I were partners in this process, and I dare say it worked. I’m sure others here at GSO found this partnership an effective way to grow. After the float program came the Pegasus project. This 3-year project required cruises to the Gulf Stream every two months. The students became quite proficient at sea-going research. Other activities came after that. Over time the implicit assumption that I might move on faded away as the our group grew from one project to another.
When a student starts asking questions about why I did ‘this or that’ you know you’re making progress. Even more exciting is when a student suggests a new way of looking at some data or a new way to make a measurement - then you know they are taking off! This isn’t traditional classroom work, but it is every bit as important. GSO’s moniker is ‘Think Blue, we do’ - let’s not lose sight of that!